Overview of TSM
Transportation systems modeling research at TRACC uses the TRANSIMS (Transportation Analysis SIMulation System) traffic micro simulation code developed by the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT). The TRANSIMS code represents the latest generation of traffic simulation codes developed jointly under multiyear programs by USDOT, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. It is an activity- and agent-based model that virtually creates an entire region and simulates the second-by-second movement of all travelers and vehicles.
Because of this high level of detail, TRANSIMS models for large metropolitan areas may require access to high-performance computing systems like those available at TRACC. Although TRANSIMS was developed originally for use on massively parallel computers, the current version is not a parallel code. TRACC staff is re-engineering this code to take advantage of the capabilities of TRACC's massively parallel systems.
At the center of this work, TRACC and the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP) are using TRANSIMS to develop a detailed model of the six-county Chicago region for use by transportation planning specialists.
TRANSIMS can also be used for planning the evacuation of metropolitan areas. TRACC is working with the Illinois Department of Transportation, the Illinois Emergency Management Agency, CMAP, and Northern Illinois University to develop, demonstrate, and evaluate TRANSIMS for such applications.
TRACC and its collaborators are working to improve the TRANSIMS code, which will further enhance the capabilities of TRANSIMS. In one project, TRACC and Northern Illinois University are restructuring the latest version (4.0) of TRANSIMS, which is a serial code, to take advantage of parallel computing architectures.
In a second project, TRACC is collaborating with visualization specialists at the University of Illinois's National Center for Supercomputing Applications to develop more robust and sophisticated visual representations of the computed TRANSIMS results.